Sarah Allen Biography

Missionary Sarah Allen (1764–1849) was one of the most famous
and revered church women of her time, beloved for establishing the
first recognized charity organization for female parishioners and
honored as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church's first
female missionary. She also aided runaway slaves through the famous
Underground Railroad.

While almost nothing is definitively known about Allen's origins,
scholars agree that Sarah Allen was born into slavery in 1764 in
Virginia's Isle of Wight with a recorded maiden name of Bass, a
detail that has led some historians to speculate about her lineage,
without empirical results. Allen was eight years old when she arrived as a
slave in Philadelphia, but details about her life before the year 1800
seem to have been lost in the folds of history. It is known that Allen
managed to acquire her freedom somehow, because she was a free woman by
1802 when she met and married Richard Allen (1760–1831), who would
later become the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church's founder
and first bishop.

A young Richard Allen became interested in the Methodist faith when he
heard an itinerant preacher speak. He was a 17-year-old slave at the time,
and found himself so moved that he chose to devote his life to the faith.
Richard Allen's master was converted as well, and agreed to allow
Richard to buy his freedom. The young man worked hard, freeing himself by
the age of 20, and began traveling and spreading the gospel to people of
all races. Richard Allen's first wife, Flora, died as the result of
a long illness on March 11, 1801.

Sarah Allen is described as a widow when she and Richard met, although
nothing is recorded on the subject of her marital status prior to 1802.
Richard met Sarah in Philadelphia while on a preaching circuit, and they
were married within the year. The Allens had their first child a year
after they were married, and three more sons and two daughters followed
soon after. Their names, Richard, James, John, Peter, Sara, and Ann were
the names of kings, queens and saints. Allen raised all six children, ran
a tight household, managed finances, and nurtured the environment her
husband required for his spiritual work.

Mrs. Allen

The devout couple made a formidable team from the start, working together
to earn enough money to purchase the land and building rights for an
abandoned blacksmith shop that was then relocated to Sixth and Lombard
Streets in Philadelphia. They bought the old shop for thirty-five dollars,
and it was pulled to its new location by a team of horses that the Allens
owned. Next they sought the help of the community to convert it into a
church. The new sanctuary was dedicated on July 29, 1794, and named
Bethel, which means "House of God." The small church quickly
grew to be an integral part of local parishioners' lives, and is
affectionately referred to as "Mother Bethel" church to this
day.

The modest Bethel church was soon joined by other black churches that
sprang to the foreground thanks to the evangelical efforts of the Allens,
including Baltimore, Salem, Wilmington, and Attleboro, Pennsylvania. These
churches joined together to form the AME Church in 1816, the first
independent black church in the United States. The church made Richard its
first bishop, placing Sarah Allen in a unique position from which to do
good. The blacksmith shop grew too small within 12 years, and it was
replaced in 1805 by a roughcast structure, which was then replaced by a
brick and stone church ten years after Richard Allen's death.

Do Unto Others

Sarah Allen's distinctive brand of charity made its debut during
the AME church's first annual conference. The young church had
struggled both financially and emotionally. The preachers had withstood
excessive traveling and tireless work without any significant funding, and
they returned for that first conference in terrible condition, with their
clothes and belongings worn, and in poor physical condition from the
difficulties of preaching on the road. Allen's biographical entry
in
Profiles of Negro Womanhood
described how the clergy had returned "in a rather
'seedy' condition, whereupon the bishop refused to adjourn
their subsequent meeting for the customary dinner at his home …
After hearing her husband's explanation, [Allen] later saw for
herself that the [preachers] had 'ventilators at their knees and
ventilators in their elbows and ventilators in the seat of their
trousers.'… [Allen] and the women of the church …
[spent] an entire night in productive labor. By morning, the preachers all
had new sets of clothes and were thus made presentable in appearance for
carrying out their ministerial duties."

Allen's biographical entry in
Notable Black American Women
explained that Richard Allen initially referred to these women as the
"'Dorcas Society,'" a title that
"generally refers to a women's auxiliary group that is
engaged in clothing and feeding the poor." The same entry also
pointed out, however, that Allen's efforts in particular were
"directed internally toward preparing good meals, repairing
garments, and improving the appearance of AME pastors." This care
and support went on before and during each annual conference until 1827,
when Allen officially identified the group as the Daughters of Conference.
Once formally organized, the group expanded, and began helping the needy
outside the clergy. Allen christened this far-reaching group the
Women's Missionary Society, which was described in
Notable Black American Women
as one which maintained "a form of children's daycare
school during the daytime hours, and helped organize adult classes at
night to help educate their church members. They also cooked meals, mended
garments, and gathered donated clothes for the needy." This focus
on education for the community had served as a foundation for the Bethel
church from the beginning, and remains a strong focus to the present day.

In a review in
North Star
of Jualynne Dodson's book
Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the A.M.E.
Church
, Stephen W. Angell called attention to Dodson's assertion that
there were three main ways women gained power in the nineteenth-century
AME Church: evangelization by word of mouth, church organizations founded
and attended by women, and the accumulation of resources. Angell's
review also claimed that these methods for acquiring power were
"employed with most effect when used quietly and
unobtrusively," an apt description of the kind of life-changing
work Sarah Allen did best.

Champion of Freedom

Efforts to hide and help runaway slaves made by families like the Allens
were later identified as the operation now known as the Underground
Railroad. Brave individuals like Richard and Sarah were thought of as
"conductors" on this dangerous journey, and Philadelphia was
a main stop for slaves fleeing from the south and southeast to the
northern states and Canada. Records show that the AME Church was involved
in this process from as far back as 1795, when the church building became
a haven for 30 runaway Jamaicans.

The Allens used their own home as well as the cellar of the church
building to hide people, and earned funds that they then gave to these
people to start their new lives in the north. In a
Journal of Black Studies
review of Allen B. Ballard's book
One More Day's Journey
(1984), scholar Beth Brown Utada related how Allen "became known
for her courage along the Underground Railroad." Allen's
obituary, recorded by Bishop Daniel A. Payne in his 1891
History of the A.M.E. Church
, related that "the poor, flying slave, trembling and panting in
his flight, has lost a friend not easily replaced; her purse now closed in
death, kindled with peculiar brightness as she would bid them God speed to
the land of liberty, where the slave is free from his master, and the
voice of the oppressor is no longer heard." Richard Allen died in
1831, but Sarah Allen continued her good works, thanks in large part to
the funds her husband left, which allowed her to focus on her charitable
aims without having to hold another job.

Historical Gender Bias

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, in her bibliographical essay "Teaching the
History of Black Women" (published in the February 1980
The History Teacher
), called attention to a gulf that has formed between black history and
women's history, one which often obscures the details and
importance of black women's lives. This intellectual gap,
Terborg-Penn argued, has resulted in a severe scarcity of secondary
literary sources that deal exclusively with the unique nature of black
women's history. Even more specifically, Terborg-Penn revealed that
historical records have done an inadequate job of representing the black
woman's religious roles, claiming that "the substantial
contribution of Afro-American women to religious life certainly merits
scholarly study."

Mother Allen

Sarah Allen lived for 85 years, and died on July 16, 1849, at the
Philadelphia home of her youngest daughter, Ann Adams. She and her husband
were buried side by side in a tomb beneath the Mother Bethel Church, a
site that has since been turned into the Richard Allen Museum.

Allen's obituary described her death as the loss of "a
bright ornament—a jewel, precious—a relic of her formation
when she was first seen to glide from the stormy element of oppression
… a pillar from the building, a mother in Israel." The AME
church's Women's Missionary Society took its
founder's name, and the Sarah Allen Women's Missionary
Society continues to help on local, state, country and international
levels, as a testament to the influence and inspiration of Sarah
Allen's life of service.

User Contributions:

I would like to know about Sarah Allen because I belong to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She seemed to have been a remarkable woman. I am trying to learn as much as I can about women of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I know that Sarah Allen was a missionary.

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